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Simple Gifts : A Memoir of a Shaker Village

Amazon.com Price:  $13.99 (as of 02/05/2019 19:38 PST- Details)

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Description

In Simple Gifts, June Sprigg tells the story of one of America’s last Shaker communities–Canterbury Shaker Village, in Canterbury, New Hampshire–all the way through its twilight years, and of its seven remarkable “survivor” women, who were a few of the last representatives of our longest-lived and best-known communal utopian society. As a college student Sprigg spent a summer among them, and here she gracefully interweaves the narrative of their lives with the broader history of Shakers in America as she shows us how her experiences there affected her own life and opened the door to her creativity.

Gleaning information from old records and journals that she pored over that summer and later, Sprigg brings to life the generations of Canterbury Shakers from the eighteenth century to the present–their customs, their architecture, their spirituality. She also explores the social and cultural forces and the internal imperatives and tensions that caused membership to decrease, all of which, by 1972, brought the community to crisis.

Chronicling the daily life of the village as she found it, Sprigg uncovers the affirming energies of the Shakers–the prominence of mutual love and respect, the devoted tradition of mothering surrogate children, and, above all, the surviving women’s spirited eccentricities. She reveals the Shakers as individuals–their personal histories, their wildly different beginnings, what they gave up to enroll in the Shaker community, and, more important, what they gained.

Through her lively text and drawings and her intimate connection with the community, Sprigg brings us close to its people with a book that both enlightens and inspires.
“It is a simple story that means the world to me,” June Sprigg writes by the use of preface to Simple Gifts, her memoir of a summer spent with the last seven residents of a New Hampshire Shaker community. It’s a fitting motto for the serene, unadorned lives of these women–“members of an endangered species,” as some of the elderly sisters wryly says–and of the joy they brought a girl who at 19 was “half in and half out of the egg.” Even if the Shakers took vows of celibacy, their religious tradition all the time included caring for children–especially those society refused to provide for–and after such a lot of years, the sisters were delighted to have a girl to dote on once again. For her own part, Sprigg found much-needed guidance as she made her own transition into womanhood: “What might have gave the look of the unlikeliest of friendships–me at nineteen, a miniskirted college sophomore, and six Shaker sisters in their seventies, eighties, and nineties, soft and wrinkled as old plums–made sense, perhaps to our mutual surprise.” As Sprigg spends the summer guiding tours, working alongside the sisters, and poring over old journals, a portrait emerges of a community that remains vital even all the way through its twilight years. Perhaps more importantly, Sprigg finds a spiritual lineage that stretches from one generation to the next–even, she imagines, coming to rest in a non-Shaker like herself. More than just a profile of a historical curiosity, this memoir tells the stories of seven remarkable but very different women, and in the process offers a invaluable testimony to the life of the spirit put into joyous practice.

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